'Seven' Succeeds Despite Its Gimmicky Plot, Creaky Cliches

Movies

The title does not refer to samurai or dwarfs - Seven means the seven deadly sins.

Those, you may recall, are gluttony, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and wrath. In Hollywood, sin No. 8 is gimmickry - a failing that the film in question certainly is guilty of.

The odd thing about Seven, however, is that except for its facile, familiar and ridiculously gimmicky plot, it's a pretty involving murder mystery.

Morgan Freeman (The Shawshank Redemption) and Brad Pitt (Interview With the Vampire) play big-city cops on a case that concerns a serial killer who is intent on punishing seven people, each of whom represents one of the sins.

This is an utterly hokey idea, of course. And because there's no real motive for the murders, the case doesn't lend itself to the sort of investigative techniques that often make for intriguing detective stories.

What the movie (which opens today) does have, however, is a terrific film-noir atmosphere and some top-notch performances. Freeman and Pitt may be playing two of the creakiest cliches of the thriller form - the retiring old-timer and the hot-shot newcomer - but they breathe new life into their roles.

Freeman, especially, sets the tone.

As Somerset, a 34-year veteran, the actor's slightly stiff, professional bearing carries great authority while his heavy eyes speak of deep sadness. We sense that he knows more than he's saying - more that Pitt, as Somerset's newly arrived replacement, can guess.

What saves Pitt's performance as Mills from cliche hell is its utter absence of callowness.

Mills may be young and new to the assignment, but he's a wised-up cop. He just doesn't know how bad things can get on this particular beat.

Fine work is also done by Gwyneth Paltrow (Pitt's real-life girlfriend, incidentally) as Mills' wife and by Kevin Spacey (The Usual Suspects), who puts in yet another of his creepily understated performances.

The script is credited to - or, rather, blamed on - Andrew Kevin Walker, a newcomer who once worked as a manager in a big record store. (Ever since Pulp Fiction's Quentin Tarantino revealed that he used to work in a video store, this sort of information has been sneaking into the official bios of more and more movie people.)

David Fincher, who directed, is the guy who killed off the Alien series with his feature-film debut, the unfathomable Alien of 1992. If nothing else, Seven proves that Fincher has talent.

This is quite a grisly movie, with plenty of blood and corpses and so on. Yet Fincher has the tact to underplay the violence that created the gore.

The dark mood that he and his cast establish is actually elegiac - a solemn tribute to Somerset and all those years of thankless sleuthing. It makes you wish the script were better than it is.

The sin of gimmickry may not be one of the big deadly ones, but it does take its toll.